Touching the Earth:
A Homestead Retreat for Young Adults
July 28 - August 19, 2023
An invitation to live and learn in a community of vibrant peers, tending gardens and practicing meditation
This three-week immersion for young adults (ages 18-25) on a secluded Vermont homestead is an opportunity to cultivate self-awareness and deepen your relationship with others and the living earth. Our small learning community will explore the Buddhist concept of interbeing through the fields of permaculture, ecology, living systems theory, ecopsychology, social justice, and climate studies. Readings on these topics will feed rich discussions facilitated by faculty, guest teachers, and students.
At times we will co-create rituals inspired by Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, calling on our moral imaginations as we live beside ancestors and future beings. Daily rhythms will include morning silence, mindfulness practice, physical exercise (e.g. work projects, hiking, swimming, yoga), solitude in nature, creative expression (e.g. writing, reciting poetry, singing), council practice, and sharing nourishing meals. We will also learn from and be inspired by local farmers, healers, and wildlife biologists – people who can share their experience of composing an original life and engaging in meaningful work during this time of transition toward a life-sustaining society.
Living Outdoors
Most of our time will be spent outdoors. We will sleep in tents, gather for meals on a screen porch, sit around a campfire to sing and share our thoughts. Mindfulness practice will take place in a meditation room as well as outside on the land. Making conscious choices about what we eat, cook crews will prepare meals in the kitchen, incorporating vegetables harvested fresh from the garden. For the entire three weeks, we will take a break from using screens and devices, supporting our intention to be fully awake to our present moment experience.
Career Benefits
This experiential program does not offer academic credit. Students enrolled in college have the option of incorporating research for college coursework. (The program faculty can serve as advisors for this process.) Upon completion, students may request letters of recommendation for college applications, internships, and paid positions. With just 12 students engaged in this intensive program, faculty come to know each student well and, when desired, can offer mentoring for education and career choices.
Edelglass Homestead & Marlboro, Vermont
The Edelglass Homestead has been evolving on a two-acre clearing in the foothills of the Green Mountains since 2010. Beautiful hiking trails weave through the mostly-hardwood forest and connect the house to a small college campus, home to the world-class concerts of the Marlboro Music Festival. Other trails lead to the tiny village of Marlboro, to extensive beaver ponds, and to the shores of pristine South Pond.
Permaculture principles have guided the design and development of vegetable and herb gardens, pollinator meadows, a small fruit orchard, and a young “edible forest” of native shrubs and trees. The homestead has hosted permaculture workshops, academic conferences and talks, and Buddhist meditation retreats, as well as workshops on particular skills such as handcrafts, group singing, and council facilitation. Groups of summer volunteers live in tents scattered around the clearing.
The rural town of Marlboro is located in the Upper Connecticut River Valley, a land inhabited for countless generations by Abenaki people, many of whom continue to live in this bioregion. Marlboro is filled with artists, scholars, and homesteaders drawn to the area by Marlboro College and the Marlboro Music Festival. The 40 square miles are mostly forested; the human population has never topped 1300. Other inhabitants include white-tailed deer, moose, black bears, red and grey foxes, coyotes, fishers, mink, beavers, porcupines, bald eagles, common loons, barred owls, chickadees, and beautiful individuals belonging to hundreds of other animal species.
“Touching the Earth”
Just prior to his awakening, according to tradition, Gautama Buddha called on the earth to be his witness. This moment appears in much Buddhist art, represented by the Buddha sitting cross-legged with his hand touching the earth. Today, this image also represents a practice of living according to the Buddhist and ecological insight of interdependence, acknowledging the living systems in which we are embedded and on which our very lives depend.
Who Should Apply
We welcome applications from young adults who enjoy living in community close to nature and are passionate about contributing to the Great Turning – the transition to a world that is healthy and just, ecologically and socially. Experience with meditation, compassionate listening, gardening, and camping is beneficial but not essential. We are aiming to form a diverse learning community, with a range of identities and life experiences. Most of all, we are looking for people who are curious about the world and ready to connect with other living beings.
Program Fee and Scholarships
The total program fee is $2500. In an effort to make this program accessible to well-suited applicants regardless of their financial circumstances, a scholarship fund has been established specifically for Touching the Earth. An application for need-based financial assistance is included at the bottom of the program application. We will offer what we can to meet financial need up to 75% of the program fee. Accepted students wishing to develop creative fundraising plans to meet the tuition balance will receive guidance and support from the faculty.
Timeline
Applications Open: January 1
Applications Close: Extended to March 27
Interviews Begin: March 25
Accepted Applicants Notified: April 15
Registration & Initial Payment: May 1
Final Payment Due: June 15
Program Dates: July 28 - August 19
For more information about this program, please contact William Edelglass at williame@buddhistinquiry.
Participant Feedback
I’m feeling so much gratitude for the precious space that these 3 weeks have brought to my life. Before coming here, I was overwhelmed and worried about the trajectory I was on and I knew I needed to take a step back and ask for clarity. This community that has emerged here has been a warm embrace and honestly more than I ever dreamed of when I applied. I’ve grown up with technology integrated at almost every level of my life and being able to take a step back has brought me so much presence, allowing me to fully see and hear the beautiful people and other beings on this land. As it draws to a close now, I’m excited and energized to go forth and continue finding spaces and communities that cultivate my truth.
It was my first experience anything like this. I feel so much more trust in community, interbeing, and humanity after being loved by this environment and experience.
I was welcomed into a beautiful intentional community that values love and connection and truly listening to each other. Being with a group of people my own age who highly value the earth, growth, mindfulness, and meditation was amazing and I could not have gotten this experience anywhere else or have asked for anything better.
I am grateful for a space where all parts of me, even and especially the ones I have trouble accepting, are welcome.
Note on Coronavirus Safety
This program will follow the guidelines issued by the CDC and the State of Vermont for preventing COVID-19 transmission. Since these guidelines are continually being updated, students and faculty will be given explicit instructions by July 1st.
Faculty
Kirstin Edelglass is a wilderness guide, ecological educator, and counselor whose passion for supporting young adults runs deep. In addition to teaching at Sterling College, Colby College, Marlboro College, and Lesley University’s Audubon Expedition Institute, she has founded a number of programs including the Canoe Expedition for Maine Girls and the Earth Leadership Cohort (for young activists learning to facilitate the Work That Reconnects). She is cofounder of the New England Council Collective and leads workshops in facilitating listening circles, song leading, and cultivating ecological consciousness. Kirstin and her husband (with their 7-year-old twin daughters) host WWOOF volunteers year-round on their Marlboro homestead.
Dawn Scott sat her first Young Adult retreat in the summer of 2008, and it meant a great deal to her to meet other young people who also valued turning inward, silence, connection, authenticity, and asking the big questions of life. Since then, she served as the Family Program Coordinator for eight years at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and continues to teach teen retreats through Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme). She is a graduate of the Insight Meditation Society’s 2017 – 2021 teacher training program, a co-principal teacher of Marin Sangha, and is a core teacher of Spirit Rock’s Liberation, Emptiness, and Awareness Practices (LEAP) Program and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and Insight Meditation's joint program, Exploring the Heart of Freedom. Dawn has a deep love of long retreat practice, the Buddha's liberative teachings, and working with young people.
Clayton Moon Clemetson has been immersed in earth-based ways of living for most of their life, from home-schooling in rural Maine to traveling with Kroka Expeditions in Ecuador. They feel fortunate to have received an early grounding in meditation by attending the Teen Retreat at IMS. After graduating from Marlboro College with a degree in holistic education, Moon studied the potential of experiential semester programs to deepen their connection with the world around and within. In 2020, they co-facilitated a nine-month gap year program with the High Desert Center in Colorado, and they have joyfully served on the Touching the Earth faculty since the first retreat in 2021. As a teacher and performer of world folk music and contact improvisation dance, Moon inspires the exploration of meditative and expressive arts.
Larkspur Morton, Ph.D. is an experiential, holistic, and liberatory educator, mentor, and leader who loves to help create vital learning communities through exploration, play, and reflective practices to catalyze personal growth and transformation. She is passionate about supporting profound connection with oneself, with other humans, and with nature. Her work has been overwhelmingly embedded within nature, sleeping on the earth a total of 6+ years, from the tropics in Peru to the boreal forest in Maine. It is also grounded in systems thinking, diverse cultural perspectives, decolonization, ecological consciousness, and activism. Contemplative practices have woven through her life, from Zen meditation to many forms of movement and dance.
Rupert Marques has practiced in the insight meditation tradition for over 25 years in Europe, America, and Asia. His teaching emphasizes the role of the Dharma in the movements for social justice and ecological sustainability. For three years, he lived and worked at Ecodharma, a contemplative retreat community in the Spanish Pyrenees dedicated to the embodiment of this exploration. Rupert leads retreats and wilderness journeys in outdoor contexts that explore ecopsychology and ecological identity. He trained and then guided with the School of Lost Borders (CA) in contemporary wilderness rites of passage and now offers this work internationally. He is passionate about supporting personal empowerment and ecological belonging in service of creating a more just and beneficial human presence on this Earth. For more information on Rupert, see https://www.handontheearth.org/.
William Edelglass, Ph.D. is Director of Studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. He publishes broadly in Buddhist studies, environmental humanities, and philosophy. William has practiced in several different Buddhist traditions and has taught widely in dharma centers, academia, as a wilderness guide, and at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, in Dharamsala, India. William is chair of the board of directors of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy and co-editor of the journal, Environmental Philosophy.
Assistants
Alice (Yanruo) Zhang
Touching the Earth participant 2022
Olivia Pintair
Touching the Earth participant 2021
Zev York
Touching the Earth participant 2022
This retreat is cosponsored by the Marlboro Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting educational spaces, events and programs that nurture resilient creative communities in Marlboro, VT and the surrounding bioregion.
